The Body Shop has hired digital marketing agency iCrossing to manage its paid media account, following a competitive multi-agency pitch process
The agency has been tasked with implementing an audience-centric strategy for paid search (PPC) and paid social. The onus is on using data to create smaller, but more targeted, cost-effective campaigns to help the ethical beauty retailer grow its new customer base over the next five years. The first step will be a complete restructure of the PPC account to improve the ROI it delivers.
iCrossing will also be collaborating closely with The Body Shop’s SEO agency and in-house brand and PR teams, to introduce a new holistic search strategy, which will mark the start a more efficient search programme for the brand.
Tom Jones, Chief Client Officer at iCrossing said: “The Body Shop has always been a true pioneer in its industry and a champion of new ideals. It’s hardly surprising then that it takes such a progressive approach to digital marketing. We look forward to creating some seriously exciting campaigns together.”
The focus for the search strategy is to introduce better audience targeting and serve more relevant campaigns.
iCrossing will review and restructure the brand’s paid search campaigns to help them target much more specific consumer groups. Better targeting will allow the team to include more relevant content that in turn will improve The Body Shop’s Google quality score, reduce costs and improve ROI.
Savings here will allow the team to shift budget into search terms that The Body Shop has not yet taken advantage of (without increasing their budget) on the non-brand side to help them attract new customers which is their main objective for the near future.
The audience focus will also feed into the wider search strategy and impact how iCrossing collaborates with the SEO agency to make sure PPC and SEO work more efficiently together. Where the Body Shop ranks well in natural search for specific search terms, the team will dial down the PPC work and on the flip side they will dial up the PPC campaigns where natural search may be struggling. Previously this collaboration was not happening and PPC was hijacking traffic as it was unnecessarily competing with successful natural search results.